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VLC Hits the Device Market

Posted by timothy on from the long-time-coming dept.

JoeBorn writes "VideoLAN has long been known as a mature open source project for video playback and transcoding on the PC. Now, Neuros and Texas Instruments have sponsored a port of VLC to their next generation open set-top box. The idea is to allow developers to easily create interesting plug-ins for recording and transcoding applications for the set-top box which will automate functions previously requiring a PC, like formating recordings for a portable player or streaming to another device on the LAN or the Internet, etc."

1 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Re:subtitles by ruinevil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    VLC subtitle support doesn't follow the SSA/ASS specifications at all. It essentially converts it into an srt file, and tries to play it. AAC audio with high-profile h.264 video in a Makrosta wrapper with ASS subtitles is the current standard in the anime fansubbing world. VLC not only renders the subtitles stripped of all styling, but since it is optimized for video streaming, it drops frames like crazy. The combination of these two issues leads "n00b leechers" to complain to the fansubbers, which annoys them greatly. This, and other encoding issues lead to the formation of CCCP, which attempted to standardize what people use to watch fansubs, and also provides a single location for fansubbers to send leechers for encoding support. I believe that CCCP only uses Free software, making it somewhat unusual in DirectShow filter packs.

    Anyways, last year, an anime fansubber found that VLC would not render lines with more than 256 characters. Therefore he created a script that would put hundreds of characters into bracketed comments after each line. VSfilter, the DirectShow subtitle renderer on Windows, and libass, the renderer that is part of mplayer, would ignore bracketed comments. VLC, however, tried to render the contents of the brackets, and the bug was triggered, and no subtitles were displayed.

    After the script was tested in a GIANT ROBOT ANIME, much hilarity ensued. Eventually driven by complaints, a VLC developer came by and claimed they lack the developing manpower to implement a subtitle renderer. However, the "excess length" bug was patched within a week. Maybe TI money will provide them with the developer resources to actually implement a ASS/SSA renderer.